Wired 13.03: Mind Control http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.03/brain.html Issue 13.03 - March 2005 Subscribe - save over 80% and get a FREE Gift! Mind Control Matt Nagle is paralyzed. He's also a pioneer in the new science of brain implants. By Richard Martin Matthew Nagle is beating me at Pong. "O, baby," he Feature: mutters. The creases in his forehead deepen as he moves the onscreen paddle to block the ball. "C'mon - here you go," Mind Control he says, sending a wicked angle shot ricocheting down the Plus: screen and past my defense. "Yes!" he says in triumph, his Thoughts Into Action voice hoarse from the ventilator that helps him breathe. "Let's go again, dude." The remarkable thing about Nagle is not that he plays skillfully; it's that he can play at all. Nagle is a C4 quadriplegic, paralyzed from the neck down in a stabbing three years ago. He pilots a motorized wheelchair by blowing into a sip-and-puff tube, his pale hands strapped to the armrests. He's playing Pong with his thoughts alone. A bundle of wires as thick as a coaxial cable runs from a connector in Nagle's scalp to a refrigerator-sized cart of electronic gear. Inside his brain, a tiny array of microelectrodes picks up the cacophony of his neural activity; processors recognize the patterns associated with arm motions and translate them into signals that control the Pong paddle, draw with a cursor, operate a TV, and open email. Nagle, 25, is the first patient in a controversial clinical trial that seeks to prove brain-computer interfaces can return function to people paralyzed by injury or disease. His BCI is the most sophisticated ever tested on a human being, the culmination of two decades of research in neural recording and decoding. A Foxborough, Massachusetts-based company called Cyberkinetics built the system, named BrainGate. After we play Pong for a while, I ask Nagle to try something I'd seen him do in a video: draw a circle. This is more fundamental and difficult than playing Pong. Drawing a circle freehand is a classic test of motor function, a species marker. Legend has it that Leonardo da Vinci was among the few humans who could sketch a perfect one. Today, Nagle barely gets to imperfect. The line keeps shooting off the screen or crossing itself. Maybe it's my presence or fatigue or some subtle shift in Nagle's 1 of 4 3/13/2005 1:34 PM Wired 13.03: Mind Control http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.03/brain.html brain chemistry due to who knows what. Abe Caplan, the Cyberkinetics technician overseeing the computer gear that dominates a corner of Nagle's room at New England Sinai Hospital, urges him on softly. "I'm tryin', dude," Nagle says, cursing softly. "C'mon, you bitch." Caplan taps on one of his keyboards to adjust a setting, averaging the system's motion prediction over a longer time to smooth out the line. Finally, Nagle manages to produce a collapsed half circle. He's exhilarated but clearly exhausted. As they finish the session, Caplan nods his head toward the computers and says, "Want to hear it?" He flicks a switch, and a loud burst of static fills the room - the music of Nagle's cranial sphere. This is raw analog signal, Nagle's neurons chattering. We are listening to a human being's thoughts. Roughly the size of a deflated volleyball, your brain weighs about 3 pounds. Its 100 billion neurons communicate via minute electrochemical impulses, shifting patterns sparking like fireflies on a summer evening, that produce movement, expression, words. From this ceaseless hubbub arose Ode to Joy, thermonuclear weapons, and Dumb and Dumber. Nobody really knows how all that electricity and meat make a mind. Since Freud, scientists have wrangled over "the consciousness problem" to little effect. In fact, it's only in the past 20 years that researchers have learned how to listen in on - or alter - brain waves. Neuroscientists can record and roughly translate the neural patterns of monkeys, and thousands of humans with Parkinson's disease and epilepsy have cerebral pacemakers, which control tremors and seizures with electrical impulses. John Donoghue, head of neuroscience at Brown University and the founder of Cyberkinetics, eventually wants to hook BrainGate up to stimulators that can activate muscle tissue, bypassing a damaged nervous system entirely. In theory, once you can control a computer cursor, you can do anything from drawing circles to piloting a battleship. With enough computational power, "everything else is just engineering," says Gerhard Friehs, the neurosurgeon from Brown who implanted Nagle's device. For now, that engineering remains a challenge. Cyberkinetics is just one of a dozen labs working on brain-computer interfaces, many of them funded by more than $25 million in grants from the US Department of Defense, which frankly envisions a future of soldier-controlled killer robots. Before that can happen, BCIs must become safe enough to be implanted in a human, durable enough to function reliably for years, and sensitive enough to pick up distinctive neural patterns. Many physicians doubt useful information can ever be extracted from neural activity, and some who believe in the promise of BCIs worry that putting one into Nagle's head 2 of 4 3/13/2005 1:34 PM Wired 13.03: Mind Control http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.03/brain.html was premature, even reckless, considering less invasive technological options still on the table - electrode-studded skullcaps or devices that rest on the brain's surface. They worry that a failure could set the entire field back a decade. "The technology required is very complex," Donoghue admits. "There are still many issues to be resolved. But it's here. It's going to happen. Just look at Matt." On July 3, 2001, Matthew Nagle and several friends went to a fireworks display at Wessagussett Beach, 20 miles south of Boston. The 6' 2", 180-pound Nagle had been a football standout at Weymouth High and was a devoted Patriots and Red Sox fan. That summer he was driving a van delivering kitchenware and had just passed the postal service exam. As Nagle and his buddies were leaving the beach, one of them got into a scuffle. Nagle jumped out of the car to help his friend. "The last thing I remember is sitting in the car," Nagle says. "My friend told me I went over to this guy and he pulled a knife." The 8-inch blade entered the left side of Nagle's neck just under his ear, severing his spinal cord. Nagle spent four months in rehabilitation before moving back to his parents' house. He can't breathe without a respirator, and though he has at times managed to wiggle a finger, doctors give him no chance of regaining the use of his limbs. Nagle's mother ran across the BrainGate experiments while researching spinal-cord injuries online, and she brought him an article about Cyberkinetics from The Boston Globe. Nagle, who had been trying unsuccessfully to wean himself from the ventilator, begged his doctors for the chance to be the first subject. "My mother was scared of what might happen, but what else can they do to me?" Nagle rasps, jutting his chin at his wheelchair. "I was in a corner, and I had to come out fighting." Wired Staff | Advertising | Subscribe | Reprints | Customer Service © Copyright© 1993-2005 The Condé Nast Publications Inc. All rights reserved. © Copyright 2005, Lycos, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Your use of this website constitutes acceptance of the Lycos Privacy Policy and 3 of 4 3/13/2005 1:34 PM Wired 13.03: Mind Control http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.03/brain.html?pg=2&topic=bra... Issue 13.03 - March 2005 Subscribe - save over 80% and get a FREE Gift! Mind Control Matt Nagle is paralyzed. He's also a pioneer in the new science of brain implants. By Richard Martin Nagle's doctor contacted the people running the trial. "A Feature: week later I got a call," Nagle says. "I told them, 'You can treat me like a lab rat, do whatever. I want this done as soon Mind Control as possible.'" Plus: Nagle turned out to be an ideal subject - young, Thoughts Into Action strong-willed, and convinced that he will walk again. The only problem: Because Nagle's brain had been cut off from his spinal cord, no one knew if he could still produce the coherent neural signals necessary for movement. It wouldn't matter how well the BrainGate could read patterns if Nagle's brain was broadcasting noise. Donoghue's experiments had used healthy, fully functioning monkeys. "That was the great unknown," says Donoghue. "When he thinks 'move left,' were we going to get one neuron firing one time, 20 the next time? Or maybe not anything? Could he still imagine motion enough to make those cells modulate, to change those spikes?" There was only one way to find out: implant the chip. On the morning of June 22, 2004, Friehs - an expert in gamma knife surgery, which uses focused radiation to treat brain diseases like Parkinson's - opened Nagle's skull using a high-speed drill called a craniotome. With a number 15 scalpel, he carefully sliced through the protective membranes that surround the brain. The living brain is a gory sponge, a mass of blood vessels shot through with a delicate mesh of fiber. Magnetic resonance imaging allowed Friehs to plot in advance the region on Nagle's motor cortex most likely to provide readable arm-movement signals to the BrainGate.